(LifeSiteNews) — On Tuesday, the Arkansas Capitol Arts and Grounds Commission finally chose a design for their long-awaited “Monument to the Unborn” to commemorate the lives lost to abortion under Roe v. Wade, which was overturned in June 2022.

In 2023, lawmakers enacted Senate Bill 307, which authorized the creation of a privately-funded monument on the grounds of the Arkansas State Capitol in Little Rock. The bill notes that Arkansas had protected children in the womb from the earliest days, but:

From 1973 until 2022, Arkansas was prevented from protecting the life of unborn children by the decisions of the United State Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade (1973), Doe v. Bolton (1973), and Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992). During the period from 1973 to 2022, approximately at least two hundred thirty six thousand two hundred and forty three elective abortions were performed in this State.

As a memorial to the lives lost from 1973 to 2022 due to the decisions of the United States Supreme Court, and as a constant reminder of our duty to protect the life of every innocent human person, no matter how young or old, or how helpless and vulnerable that person may be, it is the intent of the General Assembly of the State of Arkansas to enact the Monument to Unborn Children Display Act, and the Monument to Unborn Children Display Fund.

READ: Over 5 million babies killed by abortion in Canada since 1969, pro-life leaders tell March for Life

After Roe was overturned, Arkansas enacted its 2019 “trigger ban,” the Arkansas Human Life Protection Act, as well as the 2021 Arkansas Unborn Child Protection Act. Arkansas’s protections for the unborn are comprehensive, banning abortion except in cases where the mother’s life is in danger.

Deliberations over the design of the Monument to the Unborn were surprisingly fractious, with artists debating over proposals. On May 12, the Arkansas Capitol Arts and Grounds Commission selected a “living wall” design, which features plaints surrounded by a retaining wall. Thus far, $28,000 has been donated to the creation and erection of the monument. A rejected proposal would have featured an empty tomb with unborn children carved on it.

The rejected proposal would have been my own selection; there are a number of very powerful abortion memorials in the United States that draw on similar themes. In Resurrection Cemetery in Madison, Wisconsin, surrounded by gravestones, stands a breathtaking sculpture. It depicts a translucent, ethereal little girl of perhaps four years old walking, arms outstretched, towards a man and a woman. They are on their knees; the woman’s head is bowed, and her hand clutches her face.

The man has one arm around her and reaches longingly towards the little girl with the other, his face gaunt, haunted, and stricken with grief. Created by Slovakian sculptor Martin Hudáček and placed in the graveyard in 2020, it is called “The Memorial of Unborn Children II” and was created as a place for parents who have had abortions to come and mourn and remember.

I have seen a number of memorials to aborted children placed in cemeteries, but almost all take the form of headstones, some marking the place where babies rescued from dumpsters had been actually buried, some simply recognizing the absence of murdered millions.

The most powerful memorial I have ever seen was a temporary one. I was in Philadelphia for the 2012 trial of Dr. Kermit Gosnell, an abortionist and America’s most prolific serial killer. He had killed thousands of babies both inside and outside the womb; he kept some of their bodies in freezers and kept severed feet in jars as trophies. Along the windowsill of his abandoned clinic, someone had fastened a long row of baby hands clenched into fat fists. Each was snapped off at the wrist. They were made of plaster and as white as the limbs floating in Gosnell’s jars.

We need many more such memorials—to commemorate the millions of dead, and to urge us towards protection of those still living.